A Brief History of Stephen Hawking: Beginnings and Endings
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Over the past decade or two, proponents of what has come to be called "constructionist theory," as well as those more generally interested in "science studies" or the "rhetoric of science," have taught us to question the assumed objectivity or neutrality of scientific and technical discourse, and to recognize instead its socially constructed nature, its existence as a human (and therefore subjective) enterprise. Indeed, at its best (and here it follows the lead of such feminist commentators as Sandra Harding and Evelyn Fox Keller), this approach can be seen to challenge certain versions of authority and traditional sites of power by also challenging the rhetoric which creates them. As Greg Myers puts it in Writing Biology: Texts in the Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge (1990), scientific texts have largely been "treated as if they are just vehicles for the communication and validation of technical knowledge, not themselves shapes of that knowledge." Interestingly, while recognizing science's "shape," Myers has little to say about its influence as a shaper, both of knowledge and public perception. He does, however, later observe that science "uses our language, and despite all attempts to purify it, it is still loaded with social and political implications."
Alan G. Gross, in The Rhetoric of Science (1996), takes that idea a bit further, suggesting that "as rhetorical analysis proceeds unabated, science may be progressively revealed not as the privileged route to certain knowledge but as another intellectual enterprise, an activity that takes its place beside, but not above, philosophy, literary criticism, history, and rhetoric itself." Likewise, David Locke, in Science as Writing (1992), asserts that "every scientific text must be read, that it is writing, not some privileged verbal shorthand that conveys a pure and unvarnished scientific truth." Moreover, he captures the subjective nature of science nicely when he comments that "the scientist is a whole person, whose personality and experience cannot help but leave their mark on everything done, including the doing of the scientific work and the writing of that work."
But Locke, Myers, Gross, and others—despite their corrective reading of science as a body of created texts, rather than as the articulation of indisputable "truth"; despite Locke's recognition of the inescapable "mark" of a scientist's personality—are generally much more comfortable talking about the accumulated written work of entire scientific disciplines or the conventions of scientific discourse in general. They're most interested in how those conventions and previous work exert pressures on both the writer and the writing, so that consensus and conformism are almost universally endorsed while most traces of individuality are eventually effaced. Thus, they ignore or simply fail to consider at least two other significant influences on the scientific work: the particular subject of a given study (why, for example, was it chosen in the first place?) and the life of the individual scientist who has decided quite deliberately to pursue that research and write about that subject. That is, those who critique science through constructionist (or feminist) theory, because of their focus on the scientific community and the social or political context in which the daily work of science is carried out, have downplayed the individual's presence in favor of examining the larger historical and social apparatus. In fact, I haven't read anyone yet who is exploring the ways in which science becomes flat-out personal, the practice of it self-exploratory, the writing of it self-writing, self-performative, even autobiographical in a kind of cumulative, nonlinear way.
My own initial foray into this arena was a 1998 essay on Loren Eiseley's technical articles for specialists in archaeology and paleoanthropology. But Hawking's book—because it has the coherence of a single volume, rather than the fragmented effect of a number of separate published papers, and because Hawking is widely known by scientists and non-scientists alike—may be a more convincing platform on which to stage an exploration of the personal, subjective, autobiographical nature of science. Though it is, as he puts it in his prefatory comments, his "popular book about space and time" (not a piece of scientific writing for other physicists and cosmologists), still it has more than its share of dense technical passages and it faithfully summarizes Hawking's development of his own theories on black holes and their applicability to understanding the origin and fate of the universe. At the same time, it is accessible to a careful, curious, non-specialist reader. Therefore, it allows (perhaps encourages) an examination of the mutually defining dynamic between Hawking and his science, and by extension between any scientist and what he or she produces. Indeed, the book consistently illustrates how scientific models and the discourse surrounding them both reflect and invent (or "construct") the scientist who developed or wrote them in the first place.
In A Brief History of Time, Hawking argues that relativity theory debunked Newtonian assumptions about "absolute time," positing instead a universe in which "each person has his own personal measure of time." And later, virtually confessing to the subjective impulse at the heart of science, he discusses and accepts the "anthropic principle," which he paraphrases as "We see the universe the way it is because we exist," and which I would paraphrase (for the purposes of this essay) as "The universe is what it is because the scientist is what s/he is." The great narrative at the heart of Hawking's book is not, as the title would suggest, about beginnings and endings (a history of time); it is instead about doing away with time altogether as a central (and centrally defining) concept. If time is "personal," then how is it possible to discuss absolute origins or ultimate fates? All Hawking can do with certainty is explore time as he understands it, thus creating within the discourse of scientific exploration a narrative of personal exploration.
Near the beginning of the book, Hawking identifies his "major theme" as the search for a quantum theory of gravity, but then muses that "if there really is a complete unified theory, it would also presumably determine our actions" and even "the outcome of our search for it." It might in fact "determine that we draw the wrong conclusions" or "no conclusion at all," suggesting (or giving us fair warning) that his book may turn out differently from the way it began. Indeed, Hawking seems from the start concerned less with beginnings and endings than with points on a seamless continuum, an emphasis on being rather than on past and future. He carefully situates himself not in a specific time of his own but three hundred years after the death of Galileo. He remarks that his position as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge is a Chair he holds in common with Isaac Newton, thus inscribing himself within the grand tradition, and therefore in a sense both inside and outside of time. And while he admits that "Einstein's general theory of relativity implied that the universe must have a beginning," a proposition he will later challenge, he only reluctantly considers that it may "possibly" have an end. He has begun to create a history of which he is a part, but to which conventional definitions of time (both individual and cosmological) may not apply.
Morris's film is especially adept at mythifying Hawking, even on occasion locating him outside of time and space, at least as we generally experience them. The film identifies Hawking as someone who, in his mother's words, always had "a strong sense of wonder"; someone who, according to a family friend, "looked different from ordinary people"; someone who as a child invented a game he called Dynasty, a game his sister claimed "had no end," and who had figured out eleven distinct ways of getting into his house, while to this day his sister can only ascertain ten of them. Hawking, who himself admits he was at best a desultory student, is nevertheless retrospectively represented as somewhat larger than life, perhaps destined even early on for greatness, for solving universal mysteries and for stepping out of the normal course of things into something less bounded by both space and time. As his undergraduate Oxford friend Derek Powney tells it, compared with his fellow students Hawking was intellectually "not only not on the same street; he wasn't on the same planet."
Hawking, too, intermittently presents in his book a self threatening to slip time's constraints. He sets himself an outsize goal, "nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in," just the sort of project to keep a person alive and working for a long time. Also, despite the fact that his professional (and popular) reputation has largely been built on his theoretical research into black holes, he has a standing bet with colleague Kip Thorne that "black holes do not exist," a bet that he calls an "insurance policy." That element of doubt (created, in this case, as a deliberate personal obstacle) extends a scientist's life, insures that he must keep exploring. As Hawking concludes, with some tongue-in-cheek satisfaction, "the bet has yet to be settled." And in my favorite passage suggestive of his representation of self and personal time, he describes an evening in November 1970, "shortly after the birth of my daughter, Lucy," on which he began to think about black holes as he prepared for bed. "My disability makes this rather a slow process, so I had plenty of time." In a wonderful illustration of relativity in action, Hawking's disability (his slower process) actually serves to lengthen time for him: time for thinking, for working, for having children, for perhaps extending indefinitely the "brief" life predicted by his doctors. This passage may be the first clear indication that his book's title refers to time-according-to-Stephen-Hawking, a subversive "history" with no easily defined beginning or end.
But it is in his discussions of black holes that Hawking most conflates cosmological time and personal time. It is there that he most clearly tells his own story within the rhetoric of the scientific story. His first wife Jane has remarked (in a 1992 biography of Hawking by Michael White and John Gribbin) on the analogies between Hawking and his favorite subject, the frequent "blackness" of his depressions and his disease, occasionally alleviated by his numerous awards: "I don't think I am ever going to reconcile in my mind the swings of the pendulum that we have experienced in this house—really from the depth of a black hole to all the glittering prizes." Like Jane, Hawking humanizes black holes, though his treatment of them undergoes a change. Early on, as his own body collapses, he wonders what it would be like for an astronaut to fall into one. The answer: the astronaut would either be stretched out "like spaghetti" or torn apart. In the months following his diagnosis, his mother describes him in the film as "horribly depressed" and unable to see any "reason to go on with his research." Hawking himself dreams that he is "going to be executed" (Black Holes and Baby Universes) and in A Brief History of Time quotes Dante's description of hell as likewise appropriate for black holes: "All hope abandon, ye who enter here." He concludes initially that "anyone who falls through the event horizon [of a black hole] will soon reach the region of infinite density and the end of time."
Then something surprising happens in Hawking's understanding of black holes and (consequently? concomitantly?) in his self-understanding. Despite his own death sentence, despite having abandoned all hope, he discovers he "didn't die" after all. In fact, he discovers unexpectedly "that I was enjoying life in the present more than I had before" (Black Holes and Baby Universes). With renewed commitment to his work, he also comes to the gradual realization, as recounted in A Brief History of Time, "that gravitational collapse is not as final and irreversible as we once thought." Confronted with his own death, Hawking finds renewed life, renewed energy and purpose. And in the death of a star, a contraction from which not even light can be expected to escape, Hawking finds another kind of life, the evidence of radiation emitted from the event horizon. He comes to this finding only against "a lot of opposition" and "general incredulity," but ends up convincing "most people" that black holes "radiate like hot bodies." With this he concludes that, instead of reaching "the end of time" as he had previously believed, the astronaut who falls into a black hole will now "be returned to the universe in the form of radiation." Though Hawking admits it would be "a poor sort of immortality," the point is that the astronaut, too, has cheated time and what Hawking calls in the film the "ultimate prison." In endings Hawking has found beginnings. Indeed, his argument is that black holes don't end at all; they slowly dissipate, their energy seeping out into space. Eventually they simply "disappear . . . from our region of the universe," though where they go is unclear.
What begins to emerge in this narrative of beginnings and endings is Hawking's somewhat surprising need for meaning and significance. I say surprising, because he has already accepted the quantum mechanical model of a universe governed by uncertainty, and an Einsteinian universe where curved orbits are actually "the nearest thing to a straight path," where straight lines in "four-dimensional space-time" seem to us in "three-dimensional space" to be curved. He has accepted a universe where time has become "a more personal concept, relative to the observer who measure[s] it," where things are often not what they appear to be. Yet Hawking is uncomfortable with randomness as endpoint. Contemplating the evolution of the universe, he asks, "Was it all just a lucky chance? That would seem a counsel of despair, a negation of all our hopes of understanding the underlying order." For Hawking, challenging conventional wisdom about black holes is not an exercise in philosophical relativism, a kind of intellectual play too often undertaken for its own sake; instead, he challenges universal narratives of darkness and obliteration which have been his own narratives. When he writes that "Black holes ain't so black," he's not being glib. He's being triumphantly understated. For if black holes are "like" hot bodies, then meaning and life are actually inherent in collapse.
So, having questioned and even removed endings as absolutes, Hawking turns his attention to beginnings. Here again he sets about obscuring boundaries of time and space. And here again black holes (his own personal semiotics) provide him with the model, for they are like the Big Bang in reverse, and they point in their behavior to a central problem in trying to discuss concepts such as "before" and "after." According to Hawking and others, "there must be a singularity of infinite density and space-time curvature within a black hole," the point toward which all that matter is collapsing. But if this is true, there must have been a similar kind of singularity at the beginning of the universe, the point from which all this matter around (and including) us has expanded. Unfortunately, "at this singularity the laws of science and our ability to predict the future would break down," making a discussion of both beginnings and endings a strangely fruitless exercise.
Still, Hawking attempts that discussion and in solving the dilemma of the singularity, he also comes up with a surprising re-definition of the universe. He turns to Nobel physicist Richard Feynman's "sum over histories" proposal, which allows him to escape a sing(le)ularity because it states that a particle "does not have just a single history." Instead, it "is supposed to follow every possible path in space-time." Likewise, the present uniform universe "could have evolved from many different nonuniform initial states." There is a catch, however. Though this proposal does away with single points, paths, or "initial states," the only way to measure "every possible path" is by using imaginary numbers and what Hawking dubs "imaginary time," a concept with a peculiar effect: "the distinction between time and space disappears completely." Thus time is replaced by something fluid, newly born out of an already existing discourse of mathematics, physics, and cosmology. And having defined (conceived?) time in this way, Hawking is ready to offer his own proposal. A universe in which time and space are indistinguishable is one which quite clearly has "no boundary." It "would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE."
And so beginnings and endings become irrelevant. Having embraced "life in the present," Hawking turns away from concepts of before and after, bringing his focus instead onto what is. Uniquely able to "live in his head," he seems also uniquely able to conceive and to live in imaginary time. For someone whose adult life has been largely defined by efforts to escape the collapse into his own personal black hole, a world without boundaries is especially liberating, full of possibility, full of potential. Hawking's science is decidedly personal, but in saying this I'm not suggesting that the universe as we understand it is simply a fiction written by cosmologists and quantum physicists. Nor am I suggesting that Stephen Hawking in particular is nothing but a fiction writer. Rather, I believe that scientists, like other human beings, search out and find outside themselves those phenomena or explanations that resonate most personally and compellingly within. They "write" the world that makes the most sense to them, and in the process they reveal as much about themselves as they do about the ostensible subject of their discourse.
What then is Hawking's true subject? What narrative emerges from the interweaving of self and science? David Locke observes that the world scientists study is "increasingly remote from the world of sensory impression and increasingly inexplicable in terms of everyday experience." Hawking himself admits that his no-boundary theory is "just a proposal," a "mathematical model that exists only in our minds," and that cannot be proven. Troubled by the implications of comments such as these, John Horgan, in The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (1996), argues that the predominant mode of today's scientific inquiry, what he calls "ironic science," "resembles literary criticism in that it offers points of view, opinions, which are, at best, interesting, which provoke further comment. But it does not converge on the truth." According to Horgan, it relies on developing theories that cannot be empirically verified, but that spark discussion and even controversy. In describing Hawking's ideas, Horgan uses phrases such as "utterly preposterous" and "ludicrous," and he calls Hawking "less a truth seeker than an artist, an illusionist, a cosmic joker" with a "florid" imagination. But Horgan, in his relentless positivist bias (his faith not in truths but in the truth), misses what I find most remarkable in Hawking's rewriting of time and space. He misses, or refuses to acknowledge, what is human about science. He misses the self-writing, the act of individual, personal appropriation of scientific discourse for the purpose of genuine exploration and discovery. And he misses an opportunity to realize that science is and has always been full of "artists," writing themselves and their disciplines, just as Horgan has chosen to shape his own personal version of what he calls "the twilight of the scientific age."
Hawking has commented that his "work on the origin of the Universe is on the borderline between science and religion," but he claims that he tries "to stay on the scientific side of the border." He recognizes that he is operating at the edge of myth and narrative, and his numerous references to God in A Brief History of Time suggest just how tenuous he feels that rim-walking to be. But he has contributed to the concern among some theologians and religious studies scholars, a fear that science is, in Mary Midgley's words, "in the business of providing the faith by which people live" (Science as Salvation, 1992) or that it will, according to Mikael Stenmark, try to "substitute for," even "replace," traditional religions; that because of people like Hawking science believes itself "able to offer us salvation, to fulfill the role of religion in our lives."[1] Indeed, it becomes increasingly clear throughout his book that Hawking uses "God" to denote not a divine being but a concept, a kind of shorthand label for universal forces. That is, Hawking (who once won the Divinity Prize as a schoolboy) recognizes the power of our ideas about God to conjure up the immensity of universal time and space. He recognizes this because it is a power he too feels, one that informs his own search for a complete unified theory.
In an intriguing but ultimately maddening article, Robert Deltete argues that Hawking came up with his no-boundary proposal in order to place the entire discussion about beginnings (and endings) within the terms of science rather than within divine terms.[2] In this, Deltete follows the lead of Hawking's former wife Jane, who lamented that "her husband was trying to eradicate any necessity for God in his view of the Universe." Confronted with that challenge, Deltete grabs at the same red herring that other religious studies scholars engaged in this particular debate often pursue: he attempts carefully to argue that, despite the claims of Hawking and others like him, the evidence of universal laws does not preclude the existence of God. Even if the beginning could have occurred under only one rigid set of criteria, that "initial state may have been purposefully intended." Very possible. Hawking himself allows earlier that these "laws may have originally been decreed by God." He adds, however, that God has apparently "since left the universe to evolve according to them and does not now intervene in it," suggesting that we—collectively and/or individually—are therefore left to make sense of the universe as we find it.
Despite their critique of scientism, Deltete, Stenmark, and others (seemingly against their most committed efforts) end up falling prey to the very behavior they deplore. In their challenge, they present science as acknowledged truth, thereby according it a formidable, perhaps even absolute, authority. Unable to perceive it as a "construct," any more than they can see religion or God as constructs, they try to appease it by adopting its rhetoric. The real question after all is not the quasi-empirical "Can God and science co-exist?" or "Can science replace God?" Instead, it is "Which story do you prefer and why?" As Hawking puts it in his discussion of imaginary time, "it is meaningless to ask: Which is real, 'real' or 'imaginary' time? It is simply a matter of which is the more useful description." Like John Horgan, the religious studies commentators I've mentioned fail to recognize that they have themselves chosen to value certain narratives, certain "more useful" scenarios, over others. Mikael Stenmark claims to be a champion for all "traditional religions" against the threat of scientism, but admits discreetly that he really means "Christianity," one of the most recent. And Robert Deltete criticizes Hawking for what he perceives as his sometimes muddled scientific ideas, but reveals at the end that what he really wants is for Hawking "to consider a theistic answer."
One narrative replaces or "rewrites" a previous narrative. The discourse of one discipline preempts the discourse of another. Nothing new here in the history of religion or science, but in the brief history of an individual this reshaping points to something quite significant. For, in Hawking's words, "if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?" The same could be said of Hawking. If there is a God, then Hawking is only the (unfortunate?) victim of some mysterious divine plan. But if Hawking is himself the "creator," the one who defines not only the universe but also his place in it, then "simply" being—free of the constraints of beginnings and endings, time and space—means he has the power to ascribe meaning and shape to his disease, rather than having that meaning imposed upon him. Likewise, he has the power to choose clarity over mystery, complete individual presence over limitation and decay. Thus, the universe—the one he studies and the one that in turn serves to clarify him—becomes truly self-contained. Hawking's accomplishment is to place cosmological discourse in the hands not of science but of the individual scientist, and ultimately in the hands of the individual. As he puts it in his famous final paragraph, discovering "a complete theory" would enable all of us, "philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people," to "know the mind of God."
Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time contemplates beginnings and endings through the lens of his "own personal measure of time," creating meaning out of random chance, snatching energy and "life" from the mouth of a black hole (just as he has snatched them from his own collapsing body), and ultimately subverting the concepts of beginnings and endings altogether, as he imagines a universe (and a scientific project) without boundaries, defined not primarily by birth and death but by being. In all this, he stands as a striking (but not, I think, unique) example of the inextricability of science and the individual scientist one from the other, the extent to which science is both personal and personally defining. He claims in the last chapter that "we may now be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of science." That anticipation, that sense of possibility just around the next bend, hints at a career and life not yet finished. But implicit within the claim is, after all, an end point (the end of the search, the death of physics), a point Hawking is as always unwilling to allow. "A complete, consistent, unified theory is only the first step," he decides later; "our goal is a complete understanding of the events around us, and of our own existence." In a universe without boundaries, the work of science and the scientist will never end. In a body without a relevant past or future, which in its falling away has revealed the limitless possibilities of the human mind, Hawking has found "plenty of time," an infinity of it.
NOTES
1. "What is Scientism?" Religious Studies 33 (March 1997), 15-32.
2. "Hawking on God and Physical Theory," Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 30 (1995), 635-42.